Message in a Bottle

David de Rothschild’s oceanic eco-crusade.

De Rothschild’s boat, Plastiki, will be made entirely of recyclable plastics, produce its own energy, and generate no noxious emissions.Credit Illustration by John Ritter; Photograph: Courtesy Luca Babini

One morning last June, David de Rothschild, a thirty-year-old heir to the European banking fortune, arrived on his bicycle at Pier 31, a vast, hangarlike building that juts from the Embarcadero into San Francisco Bay, in the city’s North Beach district. De Rothschild, who has a beard and shoulder-length brown hair, was wearing a flower-patterned shirt, low-slung corduroys, a belt with a skull-and-crossbones buckle, and flip-flops. He entered the building and pedalled toward a group of people at the far end of the space: a gray-haired man in a work apron who was cutting wood with a table saw and a younger man and woman who were hunched over a twenty-foot-long, bow-shaped plywood frame, which cradled, in neat rows, under a white nylon fishing net, thousands of clear-plastic water bottles.

For a month, the group had been constructing a prototype for a sixty-foot “bottle boat,” which de Rothschild and a small crew plan to sail across the Pacific Ocean, from San Francisco to Sydney, Australia. A highlight of the trip, which de Rothschild hopes will begin in July and, if all goes well, end four months later, will be a visit to a huge region of floating plastic trash and particles, known as the Eastern Garbage Patch. De Rothschild will collect water samples to study and, using a satellite phone, post photographs and video clips on the Web site of Adventure Ecology, an environmental organization that he founded. His goal is to call attention to the perils of ocean pollution and to suggest a solution: waste as a resource. To this end, he had decided that his boat should be made entirely of recyclable plastics, produce its own energy, and generate no noxious emissions. De Rothschild has enlisted twenty-five people to help him realize his vision—consultants to design solar panels, wind turbines, and stationary bikes (to power batteries that would run small motors), along with a system to produce potable water from seawater and a “separating toilet,” so that the crew’s solid and liquid waste can be converted into fertilizer. The expedition is expected to cost several million dollars, much of which he has raised from corporate partners: the International Watch Company and Hewlett-Packard. Inspired, in part, by Thor Heyerdahl’s Pacific crossing in 1947, on a raft called the Kon-Tiki, de Rothschild called his project Plastiki.

As a teen-ager, de Rothschild, who is six feet four, was a top-ranked horse jumper on Britain’s Junior Eventing team, and he is an experienced bungee jumper and kite skier. He is also one of just a handful of people to have skied to both the North and South geographic Poles. (These feats earned him inclusion in the National Geographic Society’s 2007 class of Emerging Explorers.) But Plastiki is of a different order of difficulty and danger from anything he has attempted before. Storms, sharks, isolation, injury, and illness are standard hazards for anyone attempting a Pacific crossing by sailboat, but de Rothschild is proposing to do it in an experimental craft made from materials that have never been tested against ocean waves. He plans to bring an electronic position-indicating radio beacon and radios that can provide up to forty-eight hours’ advance warning of approaching cyclones. Even so, the boat, whose top speed is expected to be about ten knots, and whose steering system will allow only minimal maneuverability, may not be fast enough to dodge a Pacific cyclone, which can measure a thousand miles across.

De Rothschild, arriving at the far end of the pier, hopped off his bike—he does not own a car. (At his home, near London, he uses compact fluorescent light bulbs, buys his electricity from a green supplier, and maintains a colony of earthworms to consume his organic waste. Still, he commutes regularly between Europe and the United States, a habit that he acknowledges is less than ideal for an environmental activist. “My footprint is bigger than average but less than it could be,” he says. “I try and take every action I can.”) He asked Mike Rose, the man in the apron, how the construction of the Plastiki prototype was going. Rose, an Australian in his fifties who had been hired as the boat’s builder, replied that he and his workers were having a “bugger of a time” trying to prevent the bottles from shifting under the nylon fishing net. Any movement, he said, could compromise the boat’s shape.

De Rothschild bent down and poked at one of the bottles, which wiggled beneath his finger. The bottle itself, however, felt as hard as a brick, thanks to a technique that a member of de Rothschild’s team had devised to enable the thin plastic to withstand the pummelling of the waves. Inside each bottle was some dry-ice powder, which had turned into gas and expanded, pressurizing the bottle. Rose’s female worker, a Swedish college student, had spent three days with a couple of helpers putting dry ice into nearly six thousand bottles. (The actual boat will use about twelve thousand.)

“I was talking to Andy,” Rose said, referring to Andy Dovell, the naval architect who is Plastiki’s designer. “We were talking about the possibility of shrink-wrapping the hulls with Saran Wrap to hold the bottles still.”

“It’s a thought,” de Rothschild said, without enthusiasm. “But then what’s the use of having bottles? You could put anything under there.”

He stepped through a doorway at the end of the pier and looked broodingly over the bay. The week before, an environmental group called the Algalita Marine Research Foundation—whose founder, Charles Moore, claimed to have discovered the Eastern Garbage Patch, in the late nineties—had launched its own bottle-boat expedition to Hawaii, and also planned to visit the Patch. Algalita’s boat, the Junk Raft, consisted of little more than fishing-net pontoons full of unpressurized bottles supporting a platform that held a discarded Cessna fuselage and a sail. The Junk Raft had embarked from Long Beach, California, with a crew of two, its sendoff broadcast on local television.

“That’s the competitiveness of these green groups and adventurers,” de Rothschild said bitterly. “Because we’re competing for corporate sponsors, they nudge in front of you.” He was discovering an unsavory truth about environmental activism—the kind that depends on sponsors and publicity to achieve its aims. The jockeying over money, attention, and ideas taints even the most seemingly virtuous projects with vanity and self-promotion. To de Rothschild’s irritation, for the past few days prospective sponsors had been calling, asking to know how Plastiki differed from the Junk Raft. To him, the differences were self-evident. “They threw a raft together in a few weeks,” he said. “We’re building a boat. It’s not ‘junk’—it’s a resource!” He was relieved that Plastiki had already attracted some press attention, but this was also a reminder that the media interest owed as much to his last name as to the project’s ingenuity. “Nine out of ten articles about Plastiki will begin ‘David, banking this, super-rich that, or family this,’ “ he complained. “But what hopefully happens is that people, when they dig a little deeper, will see that there’s a merit in the content, past just the name.”

To de Rothschild’s right was the dramatic span of the Bay Bridge; to his left, the outcropping of Alcatraz Island. In August, 2002, when he was twenty-three, he competed in the Escape from the Rock Triathlon—which included a thirteen-mile bicycle ride, a two-and-a-half-mile run, and a one-and-a-half-mile swim, from the prison island to the mainland. De Rothschild crossed the gap, whose swift current is thought to have carried escaping prisoners to their deaths, in forty-six minutes, winning the triathlon in his age group.

He shook off his gloom and smiled. “That’s the adventure,” he said. “If it was normal or easy, everyone would be out here in a plastic-bottle boat.”

De Rothschild may be the latest incarnation of the British adventurer-explorer, a hardy and eccentric breed that includes men like Sir Richard Francis Burton, who travelled vast tracts of Asia and Africa in the eighteen-hundreds, dabbled in hypnotism and alternative medicine, was an expert fencer, and translated “The Arabian Nights” from the original Arabic; and Sebastian Snow, who, in 1951, helped locate the source of the Amazon while touring South America on a balsa-wood raft, singing the “Eton Boating Song.” But Snow undertook his explorations largely for his own amusement, and the great Victorian-era explorers typically conducted theirs under the auspices of the Royal Geographical Society, an institution with imperialist ambitions. De Rothschild brings to his adventures a twenty-first-century environmental consciousness—a desire to expose the desecration of nature by human beings. “David is someone who could sit back and enjoy what life offers,” Terry Garcia, the executive vice-president for Mission Programs at the National Geographic Society, told me. “But, instead, he is daring to voyage across the Pacific to make a point—that humans are trashing the oceans.”

De Rothschild’s most direct precursor may be Michael Rockefeller, another earnest scion of an eminent family who was drawn to remote corners of the globe. In 1961, Rockefeller, the twenty-three-year-old son of Nelson Rockefeller, visited New Guinea, where he helped film a documentary about indigenous tribes. His catamaran capsized in the Arafura Sea, near the mouth of the Eilanden River, and he is presumed to have drowned or been eaten by cannibals. De Rothschild, however, refuses to dwell on the risks of Plastiki. “Ignorance is bliss in these situations,” he says.

Like the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds owe their wealth largely to industrialization. Two hundred years ago, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who was born in Frankfurt’s Jewish ghetto in 1744, was appointed financial overseer to Wilhelm IX. Mayer groomed his five sons to be bankers and dispatched them across Europe to set up businesses in the family name (which acquired regional variations: Rothschild, de Rothschild, von Rothschild). During the nineteenth century, the Rothschilds were perhaps the most influential business family in the world, helping to finance Britain in the Napoleonic Wars and supplying the credit that drove the Industrial Revolution.

David is the youngest of three children of the former Victoria Schott, an American-born interior designer and former fund-raiser for Britain’s Conservative Party, and Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, who, until his retirement, in 2003, ran the English branch of the banking empire Rothschild’s. David and his older siblings—Jessica, a theatre producer, and Anthony, who heads a music-publishing company—grew up in London and at Ascott House, the family’s thirty-two-hundred-acre ancestral estate, in Buckinghamshire. Lady Victoria, who divorced Sir Evelyn in 2000 and now lives in London, says that David was such a hyperactive child that she worried constantly for his safety.

“You know, it would be encouraging if, as my lawyer, you weren’t also doing that.”

“I finally called my doctor one day and said, ‘I need help. I don’t know how to control this child,’ “ Lady Victoria told me. She and Sir Evelyn took him for a psychological evaluation at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. Under the doctor’s gaze, David became a passive, obedient child—ignoring an open window (“I had told the doctor, ‘He’ll run over and try to leap out,’ “ Lady Victoria said) and playing nicely with a set of bricks (“I’d said, ‘He’ll knock them off the table’ “). After the appointment, he and his mortified parents entered the elevator to return to the lobby. “At which point, David takes both fists and hits every button on the elevator as we go down. I said, ‘Oh, you are smart, aren’t you?’ “ Lady Victoria later sought help from a relative, Peter Robeson, an equestrian who had competed in four Olympics. Robeson taught David to show-jump, a highly dangerous sport. (Christopher Reeve became a quadriplegic when his horse missed a jump in one such event.) De Rothschild excelled at the sport and, at fourteen, joined the British Junior Eventing team. He might have been an Olympian himself—several of his teammates went on to compete in the Olympics—but, he says, he “realized there was more to life than spending hours and hours and hours on a horse.”

Since 2005, de Rothschild has given dozens of lectures a year on the environment to colleges and businesses, and he always starts his presentations by showing a PowerPoint slide of his dismal elementary-school report cards. “Had I been a kid of 1999 or 2000, I would probably have been stuffed full of Ritalin and put into some program, where I’m told I have hyperactive disorder and A.D.H.D. and hyper-deficit disorder,” he told me. He changed prep schools frequently and for a time was homeschooled. As a student at Swanbourne House, a school near his family’s country estate, where students were allowed to explore the neighboring fields, de Rothschild persuaded a few classmates to join him in eating what he thought were snap peas growing on a tree. In fact, the plant was an extremely poisonous laburnum. The children ended up in the hospital, where they had their stomachs pumped. “I always attribute my safety-first philosophy to the fact that he is my brother,” Anthony, who is nineteen months older than David, told me. “I’ve spent my entire life going, ‘No, don’t do that. Don’t do that. Don’t do that.’ “

It hadn’t occurred to de Rothschild to join the family banking business, but it was not immediately obvious what he would do instead. After college, he worked for a while at a music-merchandising-and-licensing company and took courses at a school of naturopathic medicine, in London. In 2001, he bought an eleven-hundred-acre organic farm on New Zealand’s South Island, near Christchurch, and, two years later, he moved to Sydney. (De Rothschild moved back to London in 2005, though the farm, which produces beef, sheep, herbs, nuts, and honey, is still in operation.)

In 2004, de Rothschild undertook his first polar expedition, after learning, on a visit to London that spring, that Patrick Woodhead, the brother of a friend, was organizing the first ever east-to-west traverse of Antarctica by foot, ski, and kite. The trekkers, who planned to cover eleven hundred and fifty miles, in subzero temperatures, needed one more person to complete the team. Woodhead, a professional explorer and the expedition’s leader, invited de Rothschild to join the group, despite his lack of experience. “Everyone has to start somewhere,” Woodhead says.

De Rothschild thought the trip sounded daunting, “But I was also, like, ‘It’s skiing. How hard can it be? Yeah, it’s cold, but we’ve got all the equipment.’ Slightly naïve, definitely.” He called his brother to discuss Woodhead’s offer. “I said, ‘You said no, right?’ “ Anthony recalled. “And he said, ‘No, I said I was kind of interested.’ “ By this time, his mother was no longer surprised by such phone calls. “I’d get calls, ‘I’m going bungee jumping over Victoria Falls,’ “ she told me. “And I finally made peace.”

The expedition team, which included Paul Landry, a Canadian explorer who had twice been to the South Pole, and Alastair Vere Nicoll, a London lawyer, arrived on the ice of Antarctica on November 1, 2004, in the middle of a whiteout storm, which confined them to their tents for two weeks. When the weather finally cleared, the group began the trek to the Pole—three hundred and forty-five miles. For much of the trip, de Rothschild was in considerable pain. “He damaged his knee the first week, while pulling sleds up this incredibly arduous glacier system called the Axel Hieberg,” Woodhead said. “For about ten days, he soldiered on without a word of complaint, despite hardly being able to ski. Also, during the kiting”—the trekkers used kites attached to waist harnesses to pull them on skis, for up to forty hours at a stretch—“he fell into a crevasse and very nearly fell to his death.”

“When I got to my tent every night, my feet were shredded to bits, my ankles were hurting, my knee was in pain—I was on Advil every three hours,” de Rothschild said. “You forget those things. I felt blessed that I was one of maybe twenty people on the planet, ever—been and gone—to have seen these scenes.” The team made it to the Pole in thirty-seven days—a record—and continued on, for twenty-three more days, to the other side of the continent. They finished the journey in late January, after spending more than seventy days on the ice.

Before departing, de Rothschild had spent fifteen hundred dollars on a two-page advertisement in a New Zealand teaching publication that was sent to every secondary school in the country. The ad described the expedition and urged students to learn about Antarctica. (De Rothschild included instructions for how to “build your own Antarctica in your classroom.”) When he returned to Australia and logged on to his computer, he found several hundred e-mails from schoolchildren asking about the South Pole and about his next expedition. The outpouring encouraged him to pursue an idea that he had begun contemplating while in Antarctica: an organization that would mix adventure, environmentalism, and education. He imagined conducting expeditions through some of the world’s most fragile ecosystems and documenting the trips on an interactive Web site aimed primarily at schoolchildren. De Rothschild called his organization Adventure Ecology, and its first mission, Top of the World, was designed to call attention to the effects of global warming: a crossing with sled dogs and skis of the North Pole, from Cape Artichesky, Russia, to Ellesmere Island, Canada. De Rothschild assembled a four-person team that included Paul Landry, Landry’s twenty-year-old daughter, Sarah, and Martin Hartley, a photographer. The group set off on March 3, 2006, accompanied by sixteen Inuit sled dogs pulling two and a half tons of gear and food. De Rothschild brought along a handheld personal computer, on which he wrote blog entries and recorded digital photographs for Adventure Ecology’s Web site, sending the material to the company’s London office by means of a satellite phone.

At the beginning, de Rothschild and his team faced temperatures of minus thirty degrees Celsius. After three months, as they got closer to Canada, temperatures climbed toward zero, and they were slowed by melting ice, which formed fast-moving channels called “leads.” They often crossed the leads by breaking off a huge chunk of ice with snow axes, throwing a rope over the water to the next chunk, and using a pulley system to propel themselves and the dogs across. Eventually, it became too difficult to get the dogs over the leads, and the team decided to have them evacuated. They went on without the dogs, sometimes travelling less than a mile a day. In early June, when they were still a hundred nautical miles from Canada, the melting ice made it impossible to continue. De Rothschild asked the expedition’s manager at Adventure Ecology to send a plane. “It was absolutely gutting for David that they had to be evacuated before they finished the expedition,” the manager, Katie Ardern, told me. “But, in a way, it also showcased the problems out there—the melting and warming that is happening so much earlier and quicker.” In a message that de Rothschild posted after his return, he wrote, “Now that I’m back at home safely it’s crystal clear in my mind what I left behind is a rapidly dying ecosystem.” The expedition drew almost two million hits on the Adventure Ecology Web site. “E-mails came in from schools all over Canada, Australia, and the U.K., and the number of requests we got for David to talk at schools was amazing,” Ardern said. “It really worked.”

Before his evacuation from the North Pole, de Rothschild had started planning his next expedition: a sailing trip that would begin in Beijing, during the 2008 Summer Olympics, and end in London four years later, at the opening of the 2012 Summer Games. He imagined stopping in various ports along his route, on a vessel that would serve as an “education center and aid boat,” with doctors on board who would perform simple operations on local people to repair cleft palates and harelips or remove benign facial tumors. Botanists and anthropologists would also come along, to conduct studies of local flora and fauna, and he wanted the boat to have a documentary-film unit, in order to make movies of the expedition. Ultimately, the project was impractical—a rough budget suggested that it would cost tens of millions of dollars, far more than de Rothschild thought he could raise from sponsors—and he abandoned it. But in July, 2006, while he was researching the route, an article online caught his attention.

The article, which appeared on the Web site of the magazine Natural History, was by Charles Moore, an amateur marine researcher from Long Beach, California. Moore wrote that in 1997 he had placed third in the Transpac, a Los Angeles-to-Hawaii sailing race, using an aluminum-hulled catamaran that he designed. Returning to California on the boat, he decided to take a shortcut, motoring across the doldrums of the North Pacific subtropical gyre—a vast, windless tract of the ocean halfway between Hawaii and the mainland United States, where the currents move in a slow clockwise eddy. As Moore entered the gyre, he saw plastic debris floating in the water, littering the surface like confetti—bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments of plastic. “It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot,” he wrote. “In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere.”

When Moore got home, he discussed his find with Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer in Seattle and an expert on flotsam, who dubbed the area the Eastern Garbage Patch. “But ‘patch’ doesn’t begin to convey the reality,” Moore wrote. The area—a kind of plastic soup, in which polymer fragments as small as grains of salt form a broth in which larger chunks of plastic are suspended—has been estimated to be twice the size of Texas. It was being fed with waste plastics from coastal waters off Japan, China, Mexico, and the western United States and from ships at sea. The trash is pulled into the gyre’s eddying current, where it rotates indefinitely. In 1999, Moore returned to the area with several other marine researchers and concluded that the percentage of plastic in the water was, by weight, approximately six times that of zooplankton. (Moore published his study in the Marine Pollution Bulletin in December, 2001.) Garbage patches have been discovered in other oceans, and researchers estimate the total amount of plastic marine waste to be a hundred million tons.

Plastics pose a significant threat to birds, turtles, and fish, which become entangled in the debris and mistake it for food. Myra Finkelstein, a marine researcher who specializes in environmental toxicology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has examined hundreds of dead albatross chicks on Midway Island, in the Pacific, and has yet to find a carcass free of plastics. “This sharp hazardous material can kill them directly, either by puncturing their digestive tract as it goes down or by creating a blockage so that they can’t eat or excrete,” Finkelstein told me. “When you open up these dead chicks, which you find all over the island, they’re full of toothbrushes and G.I. Joe dolls and plastic syringes.”

Most plastics do not biodegrade but, instead, break down into smaller and smaller pieces of polymer; these may not be toxic themselves, but they accumulate poisonous compounds such as DDT and PCBs. The particles are eaten by tiny zooplankton and jellyfish, which are in turn consumed by fish. In this way, the poisons can pass into the food chain and, ultimately, to human beings. “Farmers can grow pesticide-free organic produce,” Moore wrote. “But can nature still produce a pollutant-free organic fish? After what I have seen firsthand in the Pacific, I have my doubts.”

“So I read this thing, and I was wondering, Why doesn’t anyone know about this?” de Rothschild told me. He decided that his next Adventure Ecology mission would focus on plastic waste in the ocean and include a visit to the Eastern Garbage Patch. As a boy, he had read Thor Heyerdahl’s account of his voyage in the Kon-Tiki, and he reread the book while conceiving Plastiki. Heyerdahl was determined to prove that pre-Columbian South Americans had settled Polynesia, more than a thousand years ago, by crossing the Pacific in primitive rafts. Heyerdahl’s raft was made of balsa logs lashed together with hemp ropes, and had two masts carved from mangrove wood. He and a crew of five travelled for a hundred and one days, across forty-three hundred miles of ocean, from Peru to the Tuamotu Islands, in the South Pacific.

As de Rothschild’s ideas for Plastiki evolved, he realized that he did not want the project to demonize plastic. He was inspired by the work of William McDonough, a leading American environmental architect, and Michael Braungart, a German chemist and former Greenpeace activist. McDonough and Braungart, in their book “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things” (2002), compared so-called “cradle to grave” products (such as Bic lighters, which are designed to be thrown away after use) with “cradle to cradle” products, which are designed to biodegrade or are used to make new products without any loss in quality. As McDonough and Braungart put it, such products are “upcycled” rather than “downcycled”—their derisive term for conventional recycling, which often means little more than reconstituting a material in a lesser form. (A plastic milk jug becomes a speed bump or a park bench, which ultimately ends up in a landfill.)

De Rothschild decided that Plastiki would feature plastic water bottles, after concluding that they were among the most ubiquitous symbols of unnecessary waste. (Since 1997, sales of bottled water have increased from four billion dollars a year to more than twelve billion dollars.) “The plastic water bottle epitomized everything about this cradle-to-grave mentality,” de Rothschild said. “This throw-away, disposable society.” McDonough, who met de Rothschild in 2007, at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, told me that he admired de Rothschild’s ambitions for Plastiki. “Thor Heyerdahl, with the Kon-Tiki expedition, brought a lot of consciousness to the whole issue of transoceanic migration and people speculating about the history of the world—because it’s romantic,” McDonough said. “So David is taking a romantic approach to a whole series of very serious issues and will bring them into awareness, through the poetic imagination, with the science behind it. Which is really how cultures can most effectively engage certain kinds of questions—through the delightful prospect of the great adventure.”

Among the first people de Rothschild consulted about Plastiki, in May, 2007, was Michael Pawlyn, an environmental architect at a London firm called Exploration, which constructs buildings according to cradle-to-cradle philosophies and “biomimetic” principles, derived from nature. Pawlyn was captivated by the project. “While it’s quite an eccentric idea—and I think in some ways David does come out of that English tradition of slightly eccentric explorers—the eccentric idea was really backed up by a clear vision and also a passion to see it through,” Pawlyn told me. De Rothschild discussed with Pawlyn his idea for converting the crew’s urine and feces into fertilizer, which could eventually be deposited on trees that the crew planted, in a symbolic gesture, on a South Sea island yet to be determined. (“Somehow they’ll have to handle the P.R. on that quite carefully,” Pawlyn said. “So that it’s a very positive story, rather than an unwelcome gift.”) Pawlyn suggested that the crew use a dew-condensing technology, based on the water-producing capabilities of the Namibian fog-basking beetle, to collect fresh water at sea. “David was extremely keen on that stuff,” Pawlyn said.

In early 2008, de Rothschild hired Andy Dovell, an American-born Australian who has worked on five America’s Cup boats. Dovell is known for his willingness to take on unusual projects. In 2002, he developed an award-winning design for a new surfboard fin, the H2, whose aerodynamic shape reduces drag, allowing far greater maneuverability in the water than a traditional fin.

Making Plastiki entirely from recyclable materials proved to be a considerable challenge for Dovell. Modern boats are typically made of fibreglass, a lightweight resin applied to cloth containing fine filaments of glass, which gives the material an ideal strength-to-weight ratio but also makes it impossible to recycle, since its constituent materials cannot be separated. “Boats are absolutely horrible—you cannot recycle them,” Dovell says. “The best you can do is pulp them, then bury them.” Any fully recyclable material, he believed, would lack the strength of fibreglass, so his design would have to compensate for this weakness.

“I thought, Hang on, people travelled the world a long time ago in boats that were B-grade materials,” Dovell said. He researched the Polynesian voyaging canoes that had originally inspired Thor Heyerdahl. “I studied their proportions and how they were built,” Dovell went on. “During a couple of weeks of mulling it over, I decided on a narrowish catamaran, the proportions of which are determined by the Pacific swell. The Pacific Islanders narrowed in on these proportions by attrition. The voyagers that made it had boats that were of a certain proportion, and the voyagers who didn’t had the wrong proportions—either too narrow or too wide.”

In February, 2008, Dovell recommended that de Rothschild hire Mike Rose to be his boatbuilder. Like Dovell, Rose was used to tackling difficult construction projects. In 2006, he made a racing yacht, designed by Dovell, called the Radical Forty, which had a swinging keel and folding masts and could be packed into a forty-foot container and shipped around the world. Even so, Rose said, Plastiki was the most challenging boat-building job he had undertaken.

“The biggest difficulty is that there’s no established pattern,” he told me on Pier 31 in June. “Conventional boat-building was perfected over millennia. This, we just don’t know how it’s going to work.” He pointed at the hulls, with their lumpy rows of bottles packed five deep in places. “From dugout canoes onward, people have struggled to make the hull as regular and smooth as possible. I’ve spent my life doing that. And now I’m making a boat with hulls like this! How will it affect the boat’s performance? Can’t say, until we put it in the water.” He added, with amused exasperation, “We’re deliberately building something that’s stupid.”

Algalita’s bottle boat, the Junk Raft, had sailed on June 1st. De Rothschild had first heard about the project a year earlier, when the National Geographic Society, which was considering shooting a documentary on Plastiki, got in touch with him. “We’ve learned that there’s a man with an expedition called the Plastiki, and he’s building a boat made of bottles, and he’s going to sail to the Eastern Garbage Patch,” an officer at the society told him. “I think you should call him.”

De Rothschild did an Internet search and discovered that the leader of the other expedition was Marcus Eriksen, the director of education and research at Charles Moore’s Algalita Marine Research Foundation. Convinced that the existence of another Plastiki bottle boat could hardly be a coincidence, he had Kit Hawkins, his production partner, send Eriksen an e-mail asking, “Can you let me know when you started using the word”—Plastiki—“and when you first introduced it to the media?” Eriksen replied that he had started using the name in 2006, and, in a subsequent e-mail, said that he had registered his Web site “some time around March” of 2007. However, when de Rothschild searched Register.com, a company that tracks domain names, he discovered that Algalita’s Web site for the project had gone up on June 2, 2007—more than five months after de Rothschild registered his own Plastiki site and made his plans for the expedition public.

Eriksen, a forty-one-year-old former marine, told me that he had been a bottle-boat enthusiast for years. In 2003, he built a raft out of plastic soda bottles and travelled on it from Lake Itasca, Minnesota, to the Gulf of Mexico—a two-thousand-mile, five-month journey that he chronicled in a 2007 book, “My River Home: A Journey from the Gulf War to the Gulf of Mexico.” (De Rothschild told me that he had never heard of Eriksen or his book before National Geographic approached him.) Eriksen says that he was aghast at the sight of waste plastics along the route, and after returning home he researched marine debris and learned about Charles Moore’s foundation. In May, 2006, Eriksen sailed his next bottle boat, Fluke, made from eight hundred two-litre water bottles, down the Pacific Coast from Santa Barbara to San Diego, a three-hundred-mile journey intended, he says, to call attention to the problem of waste plastics in the ocean. By this time, Eriksen told me, he and Charles Moore were already planning a longer, Kon-Tiki-like Pacific traverse, in a plastic boat that Eriksen wanted to call Plastiki.

“It’s sort of like Leibnitz and Newton and the calculus,” Moore told me when I called to ask about the two Plastikis. He added that after his organization learned of de Rothschild’s expedition “we relinquished the name and went with Junk Raft instead.” (In July, 2007, de Rothschild and Eriksen spoke briefly on the phone and, according to both men, Eriksen agreed to abandon the idea of an expedition in the Pacific, saying, “Well, if you’re going to do it, there’s no point in me doing it.” )

De Rothschild heard nothing more about Eriksen until late May, 2008, when he was alerted to the Algalita Foundation’s project by a staffer at Adventure Ecology, who had visited Algalita’s Web site. De Rothschild sent Eriksen an e-mail wishing him luck.

I asked Eriksen why he had decided to go ahead with the expedition after telling de Rothschild he would not. “I toyed with the idea of saying, ‘This guy, if he’s so intent on doing it, then he’ll get the word out as well,’ “ Eriksen replied. “But it always was a seed planted in the back of my mind—I want to build this raft.” Constructed in just two months, at a cost of forty thousand dollars, the Junk Raft contained fifteen thousand plastic bottles and had a deck made from twenty-four sailboat masts. A week after the Junk Raft’s launch, a worker at Pier 31 told de Rothschild that he had been reading Eriksen’s blog. Apparently, caps from many of the raft’s bottles had been pulled off by the waves. “That’s a massive P.R. disaster for a project devoted to drawing attention to waste plastics polluting the seas!” de Rothschild crowed. “They’re putting caps into the ocean!” (In fact, Eriksen’s blog noted that the caps in question were attached to the bottles’ necks with O-rings and did not end up in the ocean.)

Rose finished a small Plastiki prototype in June, having devised an elegant means for holding the bottles steady in the frames. (This involved twenty-foot lengths of narrow plastic tubing strung longitudinally along the hulls.) Later that month, the prototype entered the water for the first time. The good news was that, placed by a crane in the bay, it floated. The bad news was that it could not be steered. Rose diagnosed the problem as resulting from the symmetry of the hulls; in effect, the boat could not distinguish between its front and back ends. Rose attached a rectangle of wood—called a skeg—to the end of each hull, which gave the boat directional control. Over the next three months, he tested the prototype in the bay, adjusting the placement of the sails, three in front, one in back, and experimenting unsuccessfully with using a Polynesian oar as a steering device. “Ridiculously inefficient” was the verdict. Dovell, who visited briefly in late August, decided that he would design some “small steering rudders” and attach them to the rear crossbeam.

The construction of the frame was the team’s major concern. In early July, Rose had received a sample of Ecoboard, a material produced in Winchester, Virginia, that is advertised as “a revolutionary wood alternative made from a hundred per cent recycled plastics.” Rose had never worked with it before. When the sample, an eight-foot-long panel, arrived at the pier, he tested its strength by placing it between two stacks of boxes a foot or so from the ground. Within minutes, the panel sagged to the floor like a hammock—or, as one Plastiki team member put it, a piece of chewing gum. “When I got the engineering numbers on strength and resilience, I was stunned,” Dovell told me. “The material wasn’t suitable for a boat.” De Rothschild insisted that the team find another, fully recyclable plastic.

The job fell to Matt Grey, Plastiki’s project manager. Grey, a thirty-two-year-old Briton, served as a captain in the Corps of Royal Engineers in the British Army from 2001 to 2006. He subsequently spent five months in Iraq, as a minesweeper for frontline U.S. forces, and nearly two years working for Mabey & Johnson, a British company that manufactures and installs modular bridges. He joined the Plastiki team in February, 2008, and moved from London to San Francisco, where he shared a rented house with Rose. Grey had helped solve some of the project’s more vexing engineering problems. He came up with the idea of using dry ice to harden the bottles, and when de Rothschild asked him to find an alternative to Ecoboard he read on the Internet about a plastic product called self-reinforced polyethylene terephthalate, or srPET, which was manufactured in Europe. Ordinary PET is the material from which most plastic water bottles are made. The self-reinforced variety is a clothlike substance that derives its strength from long fibres within a matrix; it’s like fibreglass but is made entirely of plastic. “There’s no cross-contamination of materials,” Grey told me. “Which means you have a one-hundred-per-cent-recyclable product.”

In early August, Grey and Rose visited an srPET manufacturer in Denmark, where they learned that the matrix material melts at a lower temperature than the fibres. This meant that the team could use vacuum pressure and heat to fuse layers of srPET cloth together for strength and then bond these rigid skins to thicker cores of PET foam to create extremely strong but lightweight panels—all without glue. The vacuum-and-heat process is commonly used to bond composite materials, like fibreglass, to foam or wood cores in boats, cars, and airplane fuselages, but it had not been used on such a scale with srPET. (The product is so new that it has few industrial applications.) One manufacturer offered to test the material for Plastiki at a cost of thirty thousand dollars. “Mike said, ‘We can fucking cook it in the oven at home,’ “ Grey told me. “I was, like, ‘O.K., Let’s see what happens.’ “

Rose and Dovell began cooking skins of srPET in the oven of their rented house and discovered that the matrix melted fully at two hundred degrees Celsius. If the oven was much hotter, the fibres within the matrix began to melt. A representative of Alcan, a composites company with which the team had consulted about the material, called to ask about the men’s research. “So there’s this multibillion-dollar company peering over our shoulders, looking at what we’re doing, and we’re doing it all in an oven at home,” Grey said.

The Plastiki team decided to turn Pier 31 into an assembly-line factory, where they would vacuum-bag and cook sixty-foot-long panels of srPET and PET cores. Even the walls of the cabin, the furniture and fittings, the shower, and the beds would be made of the material. “The whole thing will be one big piece of PET,” Grey told me. “Completely recyclable, and no contaminants in it at all.”

De Rothschild was cautiously optimistic. “On one hand, it’s a super-exciting material,” he told me, referring to srPET. “And not just because it has a huge impact on the Plastiki project itself but also because of the shift that could happen throughout the boating industry if this comes online, as we anticipate it will. There’s a capacity now to engineer fully recyclable boats. But we’ve got a long way to go. No one has ever laid up this material in this way, in sixty-foot-long panels.” Rose had sent some home-cooked samples to an engineering company and to a PET-foam manufacturer, which ran stress tests whose results suggested that large panels could withstand the Pacific waves. But there were unknown factors—such as long immersion in saltwater—that could cause the panels to split or disintegrate during four months at sea. “That means we’re the guinea pigs,” de Rothschild said.

For most of the summer, the Plastiki team communicated with de Rothschild through e-mails and text messages. Earlier in the year, he had agreed to act as the host and interviewer for “Eco-Trip,” a television show about the environment, and he spent July and August filming episodes. Scheduled to begin airing on the Sundance Channel in April, the show traces the life cycles of common consumer items—a cotton T-shirt, a gold ring, a light bulb—from manufacture to disposal, demonstrating their impact on the planet. Colleen Halpin, the show’s executive producer, told me that she had approached de Rothschild after speaking to Kevin Wall, a television producer, who, with Al Gore, created the “Live Earth” rock concerts, in 2007. De Rothschild had written a tongue-in-cheek book, “The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook,” which was sold at the concerts.

“They were looking at all the usual suspects who were American,” Wall says of the search for a host for “Eco-Trip.” “TV stars and movie stars. I said to Colleen, ‘Look, here’s a guy who’s six feet four, he’s incredibly good-looking, he’s single, he’s a Rothschild, he’s got a mid-Atlantic accent, he’s walked across both Poles, and I’m telling you that’s where you should place the bet.” De Rothschild told me that he took the job because he liked the show’s irreverent tone.

The show continued shooting through the end of October, which often meant sixteen-hour days for de Rothschild, who is in every scene of every episode. In four months, he repeatedly crisscrossed North America with the “Eco-Trip” crew, shooting in Nevada, Maine, Vermont, Seattle, British Columbia, Yosemite, West Virginia, Silicon Valley, the Florida Everglades, Chicago, New York, and, in the show’s sole foray from the continent, the Dominican Republic. He interviewed scientific experts on global warming, mountaintop removal, salmon farming, and e-waste disposal, and spoke to ordinary people whose lives were being affected by environmental devastation. In that time, he took only four days off, in late August, to visit Burning Man, the annual alternative-culture festival in the mudflats of Nevada, where he celebrated his thirtieth birthday.

On the last day of October, I joined de Rothschild as he was shooting the final pickup scenes for “Eco-Trip” in locations north of New York City. When he climbed into the back seat of the car that was to take him from the Bowery Hotel, in NoHo, to Mount Vernon, half an hour north of Manhattan, where he was to shoot a segment about e-waste at an electronics-recycling plant, he looked exhausted. He admitted that he had slept only two hours the night before, having got up at 3:30 A.M. to answer text messages.

At the recycling plant, he donned goggles, an apron, and a pair of elbow-length gloves and interviewed the plant’s manager as they looked through tall boxes of junked computers, televisions, VCRs, and printers. He watched as a pile of cell phones was funnelled into a twenty-foot-high shredder, which tore them into coin-size pieces. These were then separated, on a slotted table that shook back and forth, into ferrous and nonferrous elements. The manager explained that the factory would sell the material to smelters and manufacturers for reuse, instead of dumping the waste into a landfill, where chemicals and toxins could leach into the water table. At one point, de Rothschild snatched two phones from a conveyor belt and held them to his ears, shouting “Who ordered pizza?” and “Someone’s drugs are hidden here!” Halpin laughed. “We let him do a lot of goofy stuff,” she said. “Some of it we tone down in the editing room.”

Back in the car, on the way to the next location, an organic dairy farm an hour north, de Rothschild talked excitedly on his BlackBerry to Grey in San Francisco about his latest ideas for Plastiki. “We really ought to stop at the Solomon Islands to build a solar project,” he said. “And, tomorrow, I’ve got a meeting with Nike to discuss using the waste plastic from their shoemaking factories to create shoelaces. And I want to make sure that we move ahead on those plans to have students from U.S.C. come to the pier to paint banners and murals and create a kind of drop-in center. And then we’ve also got to make some decisions about a dry-run Plastiki sail from San Francisco to San Diego.” He finished the call by describing a “brain wave” he’d had about outfitting the boat with solar-powered LED lights and contacting NASA to ask whether it might be able to photograph the lit-up vessel from outer space.

De Rothschild was determined to create a “lasting legacy” for Plastiki. As a cautionary tale, he cited the Junk Raft, which had arrived safely in Honolulu at the end of August—after eighty-seven days at sea, during which Eriksen and a crew member had dodged four hurricanes and subsisted largely on canned beans. The Junk Raft skirted the edge of the Eastern Garbage Patch, posted videos to YouTube, and collected plastic and plankton samples from the gyre, which Eriksen plans to distribute to legislators and educators, during a fifteen-city bicycle tour in April. “As an out-and-out adventure, I take my hat off to them,” de Rothschild told me. “I think it’s fantastic, but—and I mean this in the nicest possible way—if the Plastiki was just an adventure, I would consider our expedition a failure. Because I think the Junk Raft created some awareness and got some media stories, but I really wonder what the impact truly is.” He noted that Eriksen had not updated the Junk Raft blog since arriving in Hawaii. He maintained that Plastiki’s influence would be greater.

In November, de Rothschild moved to San Francisco to devote himself to Plastiki full time. After pushing back the date of the launch, because of production delays, he had settled on April 28, 2009—sixty-two years to the day since Thor Heyerdahl set out from Peru on the Kon-Tiki.

“Or we could turn on the TV and let younger, more beautiful people have sex for us.”

By late January, Pier 31 was bustling with activity as workers, rushing to meet the launch deadline, began assembling the actual boat. In the center of the build site sat two large, curved wooden platforms—halves of the mold that was to be used to make the boat’s deck. On top of one platform, four carpenters were constructing a plywood mold for the crew cabin: a geodesic pod twenty feet long and six feet high, made of interlocking triangles and designed by volunteers from Architecture for Humanity. A few feet away, two young women, using sixteen-ounce measuring spoons, were putting dry-ice powder into two-litre soda bottles, then screwing on the caps. In two weeks, they had prepared forty-two hundred bottles, but they still had eight thousand to go. More bottles arrived daily from a waste-management company, which hauled them to the pier in dumpsters.

On the opposite side of the space was a conference table holding laptops and a large printer, where de Rothschild, dressed against the pier’s pervasive chill in a flannel shirt and a wool ski cap, sat with Matt Grey and the most recent addition to the Plastiki team, Josian Heyerdahl—Thor’s twenty-five-year-old granddaughter. A small brown-haired woman in a parka, Josian was born in Italy and reared in South Africa. As a child, she was fascinated by environmentalism, in part because of her famous grandfather. “My grandfather was an advocate for sustainability before it became a buzzword,” Josian told me. “He lived a very organic life style.” An environmental scientist, she had recently moved from Sydney to Palo Alto—drawn, she said, “by California’s progressive environmental policies”—and had read a magazine story about de Rothschild and Plastiki. “I saw the reference to the Kon-Tiki, so I wrote and asked if I could meet him when he was next in San Francisco,” she said.

After several visits to Pier 31, Josian accepted an invitation from de Rothschild to join the expedition on the final leg of its journey. In the meantime, he had secured a similar commitment from Josian’s cousin Olav Heyerdahl, who in 2006 retraced his grandfather’s Pacific crossing in a balsa-wood raft. Olav was to join Plastiki on the first leg of the trip, from San Francisco to San Diego.

Josian also signed on to work three days a week at the pier, where de Rothschild put her in charge of a project he had concocted to insure Plastiki’s legacy: the “SMART competition,” whose purpose was to find novel ways to turn waste into a resource. The name of the competition stood for the five fields in which de Rothschild hoped to solicit entries: science, marketing, art and industrial design, research, and technology. (The people with the best ideas in each of these fields, as determined by a jury of experts, will be awarded a cash prize of an amount “yet to be determined,” de Rothschild says.) “To me, that’s the most exciting bit,” he told me at the pier in late January. “To be able to sit down, post-Plastiki, with a list of solutions and activities that have been inspired by the expedition—these five or ten projects are going to become a reality for beating waste. They give us a quantifiable measure of the project’s success.”

By this time, Matt Grey and Mike Rose had spent weeks preparing the assembly line for making the srPET panels. Running the length of the pier were two huge tables with heat-resistant tops. At the end of one of the tables stood a five-foot-high aluminum frame on casters and, on top of the frame, two gas-fed catalytic heating elements that looked a little like waffle irons. Finally, there was a roll of high-temperature, clear-plastic vacuum-bagging material—ten thousand dollars for three rolls—mounted on a spool. The plan was to stack the srPET-cloth layers and PET-foam cores on the tables, vacuum-bag them, then roll the heating apparatus down their lengths, melting the materials together. Rose’s first attempt was not perfect, however. The srPET failed to bond sufficiently to the foam, and the panels had warped.

“I’m pretty sure it’s because we heated the panels too quickly, and too hot,” Rose told de Rothschild. He said that he was going to try again, using less heat and cooking the panels longer.

“O.K.,” de Rothschild said uncertainly. “I’ll check in later.” He returned to the conference table, where he was scheduled to meet with a team from Hewlett-Packard to discuss ways to store digital data collected during the trip.

Rose’s helpers placed two pieces of foam core on one of the tables, then arranged three layers of srPET cloth on the foam, carefully lining up the edges and trimming away the excess with a heating element. They wrapped the cloth and foam in a sheet of vacuum-bagging plastic, which they sealed tight. Rose poked a plastic tube through one end of the bag. The other end was attached to a small vacuum pump, which he turned on. The vacuum sucked air out from under the plastic sheet. Within five minutes, the bag had formed a skin over the panel, exerting a pressure of one ton per square foot.

Rose ignited the catalytic heating elements, and after an hour the team had heated one side of one panel. At a certain point, Rose realized that his helpers had moved the heater along too quickly, slightly undercooking a two-inch strip of panel. “You’ve got to cook every inch!” he said urgently. “Otherwise, the skin will separate from the foam. Then the whole panel will come apart. The boat will break up, and lives will be in danger!”

Toward the end of the day, Grey and de Rothschild came over. Grim-faced, they studied a few of Rose’s panels. It appeared that it would take three to four months simply to cook all the panels for the frame.

“I’ve told our sponsors and partners and the media and the team that we’re leaving in three months,” de Rothschild said, after Rose’s workers had left for the day. “But we won’t have a boat!”

Early the next morning, Greg Pronko and Mike O’Reilly, the owners of a local company that uses sophisticated plastics to make laminated snowboards, pulled into the pier in a biodiesel van. Rose hoped to hire the men, whose company owned a robotic-controlled router, to cut the panels for the boat’s bulkheads. Pronko and O’Reilly examined the panel-making operation and advised de Rothschild to replace Rose’s system with a mechanized process. Pronko and O’Reilly—eco-minded San Franciscans in their mid-thirties, who, in 2006, converted their factory to solar power and had lately been trying to develop a biodegradable plastic for packaging—also suggested using a PET adhesive film to bind the boat’s beams, bulkheads, and hulls.

Pronko and O’Reilly joined the Plastiki team that day. From their snowboard factory, they shipped to the pier a massive thermoplastics-bonding machine, which compressed the vacuum-bagged layers of srPET and PET-foam core on both sides simultaneously, at a temperature of two hundred degrees Celsius—a process that enabled three people to produce bulkheads and small panels at a rate of about two inches per minute. Rose says that within a few days of his initial attempts he had improved his process for making panels, and that his rate of production was faster than the machine’s. Nevertheless, in March de Rothschild dismissed Rose. “It just felt that the project got to the point where it needed a good injection of energy from some new people,” de Rothschild wrote in an e-mail. Rose also wrote to me, saying, “Being the only professional of any sort (builder, skipper, etc.) on the project, I was the odd one out.”

When I spoke to de Rothschild in mid-March, he sounded upbeat. “We’re turning out some beautiful panels for the bulkheads,” he said, “and I’ve finally started sailing lessons in the bay!” But that same week Adventure Ecology announced that Plastiki’s launch was being pushed back from April 28th to an unspecified date, “most probably in the summer.”

More bad news followed. An official from the San Francisco Port Authority inspected the pier and, concluding that the building was unsafe, told the Plastiki team that it would have to move out. The same day, the team discovered that many of the bottles that had been hardened with dry ice had started to leak. “It’s, like, why would thirty per cent of the bottles that we’ve done now start leaking?” de Rothschild wondered. He subsequently learned that the leaks were due to slightly defective threads on certain caps—an easy enough problem to fix—and, ultimately, the team didn’t have to move far: just to the opposite end of the pier, near the large doors that opened onto the Embarcadero. De Rothschild seemed almost to relish the obstacles. “I don’t want people to think that this is easy,” he told me.

In his view, the problems only underscored the differences between the Junk Raft—a crudely assembled boat that simply floated on the Pacific currents—and Plastiki. His would be a full-scale catamaran of purely experimental design, construction, and materials—a boat that, he hoped, would revolutionize shipbuilding. If the price of such ambition was repeated setbacks, de Rothschild was more than willing to accept that.

“We could get out past the Golden Gate Bridge, sail up the coast for three days, and everything’s fine,” he said. “Or we could get up there, and it’s ‘All right, this is really not performing how we thought it would’—stuff is breaking all over the place or materials start to delaminate. Know what I mean? These are just unknowns. That’s an adventure! If it was planned and everyone knew, no one would be interested.” ♦